EP084: Improve the Readability of Your RFP Response – with Samantha Enslen
Proposals that win business are easy to read. But how do we make technical content accessible without dumbing down the material? And what tools are available to help us improve the readability of an RFP response?
Samantha Enslen is the content strategist and technical editor behind Dragonfly Editorial, an award-winning creative agency known for explaining complex topics clearly. The Dragonfly team creates content for some of the world’s leading consulting firms, including PricewaterhouseCoopers, Booz Allen Hamilton and DXC Technology. A leader in the world of proposal writing, Samantha was recently named a 2020 APMP Fellow.
On this episode of The RFP Success Show, Samantha is back to discuss readability, describing how to enable Word’s readability function and interpret the data it provides.
She explains why proposals should be written below a ninth-grade level (even when they convey a complex technical message) and shares the surprising Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level scores of several great works of literature.
Listen in for Samantha’s insight on writing in first person and get her #1 tip for instantly making your proposal more accessible and easier to read!
Key Takeaways
The 2 readability meters you can use to analyze the text of an RFP response
How the number of words per sentence and percentage of passive voice impacts readability
How to enable the readability function in Microsoft Word
How readability data helps SMEs learn to be more concise
Why proposals should be written below the 9th grade level (even if they convey a complex technical message)
How great works of literature score surprisingly low on the Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level scale
Why Samantha recommends writing in 1st person whenever possible
The biggest mistakes Samatha sees in proposal writing
Overly formal rather than conversational
Too much detail, irrelevant information
Responses that don’t answer the question
The conscious effort it takes to write from the reader’s perspective
Samantha’s #1 tip for instantly making your proposal more accessible and easier to readaccessible and easier to read
RFP Success Show EP84 Transcription
You're listening to the RFP Success Show with eight-time author, speaker, and CEO of the RFP Success Company, Lisa Rehurek. Tune in each episode to learn what today's capture and RFP teams are doing to increase their win percentages by up to 20, 30, and even 50% and meet the industry trailblazers that are getting it right. Let's get started.
Lisa Rehurek (00:24):
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the RFP Success Show. I'm your host, Lisa Rehurek, founder and CEO of the RFP Success Company. We are back again with part two of my interview with Samantha Enslen, president of Dragonfly Editorial and proposal content guru. Samantha, welcome back.
Samantha Enslen (00:40):
Welcome, Lisa. So great to be here.
Lisa Rehurek (00:42):
So last time, we kind of left off talking about readability. I love the conversation about readability, because of course that's what it's all about, right? Can they follow along easily, concisely in order to score you appropriately, right? That's what we're trying to do, is give them the information that they need in order to get the score you deserve. So one of the tools that we've talked about that I learned about from you, in all my time in proposals, I never knew this existed, is that function in Word, that readability function in Word. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Samantha Enslen (01:14):
Sure. Well, first of all, let me back up and say there's a concept of something called readability meters. These are something that have been ... Gosh, they were developed probably in the 1960s and forward from there, and they're designed to analyze a piece of text and tell you how readable it is. Is it easy to read? Is it hard to read, et cetera? There's different types of them.
Samantha Enslen (01:38):
The two that are probably most commonly used, one is called the Fleisch-Kincaid Grade Level Readability Meter, and it analyzes a piece of text and it assigns it a grade level readability. So something might come back at third grade readability, twelfth grade readability, and it just kind of goes up from there. So you could send in something really complex, and it would come back with like a 30th grade level readability, which obviously doesn't really exist.
Lisa Rehurek (02:09):
Wow.
Samantha Enslen (02:09):
But that tells you, "Oh my gosh. This piece of material is really hard to read." There's also another one called the Fleisch Readability Ease Scale. So you can tell there's a guy named Fleisch who invented these.
Lisa Rehurek (02:23):
Right.
Samantha Enslen (02:25):
It does the same thing. It analyzes texts, and that one comes back on a scale of 1 to 100.
Lisa Rehurek (02:33):
Oh.
Samantha Enslen (02:33):
On the Fleisch Reading Ease Score, just to make things confusing, a higher score is better.
Lisa Rehurek (02:41):
Oh, interesting.
Samantha Enslen (02:42):
So the higher score you are on the Fleisch Reading Ease, the better, whereas on the Fleisch-Kincaid, the lower you are, the better. So a little bit of a mind-bender there.
Lisa Rehurek (02:54):
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:02:55].
Samantha Enslen (02:55):
But point being both of those measurements are built into Microsoft Word as well as some other key ways you can judge readability, which is the percent of passive voice in a document and the number of words per sentence. Needless to say, your percent of passive voice is, the higher your readability is, not because passive voice is bad, necessarily, but it is often an indicator of overly complex sentence structures, things that could be said more directly, more plainly. Passive voice just kind of can be a signal that we're not speaking or writing as plainly as we could.
Lisa Rehurek (03:40):
That's great feedback.
Samantha Enslen (03:43):
Sentence length, again, is an indicator. Not that it's horrible or a sin to have a long sentence, but showing an average of lots of long sentences in your proposals, if you have an average of, say, 20-, 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-word-long sentences, that's going to be a big signal that your proposal is not as easy to read, as easy to access, because, again, what some studies have shown is that for readers, once they get past about 14, 15 words in a sentence, they don't just keep plowing through like, "I'm determined to read and understand this sentence." They basically just stop, literally stop reading-
Lisa Rehurek (04:32):
Oh my God. I would do that. Yeah.
Samantha Enslen (04:32):
... and skip to the next sentence. It's like a sliding scale. They pretty much hang with you for about 14 words, and then they drop off faster and faster the longer your sentence gets after that.
Lisa Rehurek (04:50):
Interesting.
Samantha Enslen (04:51):
So point being these four key measures of readability, the two Fleisch scales, passive voice, I meant percent of passive voice and number of words per sentence are all available if you enable the readability metrics in your Microsoft Word. I won't describe how to do it right here, Lisa, but it's in your settings in Word. Let's just put it that way.
Lisa Rehurek (05:17):
Yeah, and I just Googled it and I figured it out. It's super easy to do, but it's probably not natively just in there. You've got to activate it.
Samantha Enslen (05:24):
You do have to activate it. Yes. Once you activate it, every time you run spell check or I think what they call review, the newer versions of Word, your metrics, once you go through the whole review and are like, "Yep, that's fine. No, that's not fine," with all their suggestions, the readability metrics will pop up after that.
Lisa Rehurek (05:44):
Got it.
Samantha Enslen (05:45):
This also goes back. In our last episode, we were talking a lot about how to convince technical folks to write a little bit more concisely. Hello. We can actually give them hard numbers with this now, which is probably music to their ears. If you're like, "Yeah, your section's a little too long," they might not care. But if we can come back and say, "Hey, we're showing that readability for this section is at this level, and we really want it to be at this level," well, then all of a sudden, now we have data define what we're talking about, so it's a more objective measurement.
Lisa Rehurek (06:25):
Yeah, and a lot of technical people really love that proof, right? But that brings up a good point, because I'd love your opinion on this. I know that I've talked to technical people before, and I'm like, "You want to be writing to maybe a sixth grade level or an eighth grade level," and they think I'm nuts, because they, of course, come from very highly technical fields where the intelligence factor is very important. So to get them to comprehend that it's better to be writing to a lower grade level, how do you do that?
Samantha Enslen (07:01):
Yeah, that's a great question. From that perspective, it's kind of unfortunate that the Fleisch-Kincaid Grade Level Readability Score is used so frequently, because it doesn't make sense to people a lot when you say, "Oh, yeah, we should write for a seventh grade level," and they're like, "Well, our readers aren't seventh graders." It's not exactly an indication ... It's not at all an indication that seventh graders would be reading this.
Samantha Enslen (07:30):
The thing I try to tell people is that when we're submitting content for people, the smarter they are, the higher up they are in an organization, the less time they're going to have in their schedule. A C-suite reader or somebody who's a high level evaluator, they got to that because they're very successful people. They don't have a bunch of time to waste reading our content, so we have to make our material particularly easy to read, quick to get in, get out, and get the information and leave. So that's the point of these readability meters, is helping people get in and out of the content quickly. It's not really about dumbing down the content. Highly sophisticated material is written at a seventh or ninth grade level.
Lisa Rehurek (08:21):
That's crazy.
Samantha Enslen (08:22):
Yeah, you would never know. It doesn't have to do with using simplistic words like cat, dog, birdie. It's about cutting out unnecessarily long words in your text. Why say accordingly? You can just say so, for example.
Lisa Rehurek (08:45):
Or not at all.
Samantha Enslen (08:48):
Or not at all. Right, or the famous utilize instead of use. In our content, we often have to convey complex technical messages and use terms of art to our industry. We can't strip those out. Plain language or readability is not stripping out the truly important technical content. It's about making all the language around that simpler, concise, easier to get through. In a way, it's actually helping their technical content stand out. It's not weighing their technical content down with all this other muck around it.
Lisa Rehurek (09:28):
Well, and it's interesting, too, because I found recently, and I don't know if this is a new Word update or it's because I added that readability function in, but I love how it blue underlines when I'm using too many words. If I'm using three words instead of ... and I can't even think of the one that I do a lot. I'm starting to see my own habits, and the replacement word is must. But instead I use three words, and I'm like, "Oh, that makes so much more sense 98% of the time, 99% of the time." It's starting to train me a little bit. I think that's another great thing about those features, is it starts to train us a little bit more, wouldn't you say?
Samantha Enslen (10:04):
I agree. Now, Word or any other software like that is at the end of the day only a machine.
Lisa Rehurek (10:11):
Right.
Samantha Enslen (10:11):
So some of the suggestions that it gives me, I'm like, "No, I don't want to do that," but we get to choose which ones we want to accept. But I agree with you. Some of the suggestions that Word is now starting to make where it's pointing out areas where you're being redundant or using too many words can be really valuable.
Lisa Rehurek (10:32):
Yeah. So you said something a couple minutes ago that I wanted to address, because this is how I always combat the argument of people say, "Well, I don't want to write to a sixth grade level." I always kind of throw out that a good portion of the major publications out there write to a sixth grade level or somewhere in that vicinity. You mentioned that some of the more complex ones even write eighth or ninth grade. Is that what you said?
Samantha Enslen (10:57):
Gosh, I don't know off the top of my head, but I did a readability study once on a bunch of different books. Things like Pride and Prejudice, for example, which you would think that's a sophisticated literary gem of our age is written at a seventh grade level.
Lisa Rehurek (11:16):
Wow. Okay.
Samantha Enslen (11:17):
Other books like that, like Carl Sagan's Cosmos, again, which is literally explaining how the entire universe works I think is written at a ninth grade level. So there's lots of examples like that of people presenting very complex content, but if you actually look at the readability, it's surprisingly low.
Lisa Rehurek (11:38):
That's great. I love that conversation, because I think, again, readability is key, right? That's a huge piece of what we're doing here. All right. Another question for you, first person, third person, when and where? I get this all the time, and I'll be honest with you. I'm not really great at answering it.
Samantha Enslen (11:56):
Sure, sure.
Lisa Rehurek (11:56):
So you're brilliant, Samantha.
Samantha Enslen (11:59):
Well, here's my two cents. Again, I'll jump back to the new ISO standards that are coming out on plain language. One of their recommendations is whenever possible, address the reader directly. So that's speaking in first person, so, "We're submitting our proposal. Here's what we can do for you. Here's how we will help solve your problems." So it's in first person, a real human speaking to another human or set of humans. So generally speaking, that's my recommendation. You may know in your particular situation that that's not quite the right fit, and that's okay.
Samantha Enslen (12:39):
The other thing I will say about that is contrary to what you were taught in fifth grade or whatever, I think it's okay in our proposals to jump back and forth between first person and third person.
Lisa Rehurek (12:50):
Ooh, so we can have that.
Samantha Enslen (12:54):
So let's say I'm doing one of my proposals. For example, I'll say, "Here's what we are offering you. We are going to bring you X, Y, and Z writing services." Then all of a sudden, we have to answer sort of an About section. Then I switch into third person. "Dragonfly was formed in 2005." To me, it does not cause a dissonance to go between first and third in proposals. Somebody who is a strict copy editor will get all agitated about that. I think it's perfectly fine.
Lisa Rehurek (13:27):
Well, especially from section to section, right? I mean, if you're mixing it up in one paragraph, that's going to be a little bit weird, but I liked the way that you described that. That's perfect. We get that question a lot, and I'm very much of a first person type. That's my recommendation to you, because I feel like it makes it more personal. It allows you to connect better, which builds some trust, and there's an emotion that is evoked there versus ... I don't know. Maybe I'm aging myself here, but I feel like that's not how we were taught to write when I was young. I mean, certainly when I was young, it was very buttoned up and professional and very third person. But I think people are craving that first person connection more, more and more these days.
Samantha Enslen (14:06):
Yeah, I agree, and I think that's how all of us were taught somehow, that business language is supposed to be very formal in third person. That's certainly how the scientific and medical community writes in their medical journals, for example, because we edit some of that content. It's not like, "We learned this. We found this. Here's what we discovered." It's all kind of a weird third person account of what the findings were and what the discoveries were, but that's how it's done there.
Lisa Rehurek (14:41):
[crosstalk 00:14:41]. Yeah, it seems more appropriate for something like that. Interesting.
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Lisa Rehurek (15:10):
All right. So what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people make in their writing, particularly when we're talking about proposals?
Samantha Enslen (15:18):
That's a big question, Lisa.
Lisa Rehurek (15:21):
How much time do we have, right? I know.
Samantha Enslen (15:27):
I do think that one of them can be being overly formal sometimes, people writing the way they think a proposal is supposed to sound or a business document is supposed to sound, rather than writing in a more natural, conversational way.
Lisa Rehurek (15:47):
It's like they follow suit from the RFP questions, right? Then they go into the same kind of buttoned up ... Yeah, I find that, too.
Samantha Enslen (15:55):
Yeah. That's not to say that our proposals should be like, "Yo, dude, buy our stuff," but we can still write in a little bit more natural way. I think what we talked about earlier, the tendency to add too much detail, too much information that's not really relevant to the reader or is showing the reader how we bring value or something different or unique that we're going to bring, but we're just like, "Oh, let's throw this in, throw this in just as an FYI." Those are two of the bigger things that I see. Oh, and I guess the one biggie that I do find other proposal managers complain about a lot is people not answering the question.
Lisa Rehurek (16:39):
Always. It's crazy to me, and we tell people that and they're like, "Oh, no, we answered the question." Then we'll do a review of their proposals, and they're not answering it. I've got gobs of examples, or they answer part of it. But sometimes, especially in government proposals, they'll ask six questions in one.
Samantha Enslen (16:56):
Right.
Lisa Rehurek (16:56):
It's a little bit hard to keep track of that sometimes. So yeah. The other one that I find, too, is that they're too "me, me, me" focused, and kind of goes to the second one that you talked about, but not enough focused on the solution at hand and how what you're providing is going to give value to them. It's not about us, right? It's not about the person writing the proposal, even though it feels like it at the time, but it's really not about that.
Samantha Enslen (17:23):
Yeah, and I think that's a great point, trying to craft your writing from the reader's perspective. It's really hard to do. I run into this all the time, for example, when I'm writing emails to people, maybe somebody who I think is a prospect or somebody who's interested in our services, and I'm like, "We can do this. Yes, and we do this. We can provide this." Then I stop and then I go back and reread my email, and then I have to re-craft some of the things written from their perspective, like, "We know your schedules are tight, so we can help with such and such. Because your material is so complex, we have technical editors who have specialty in that field," or I have to be really thoughtful about how to make the content address their needs upfront, rather than just talking about, "Oh, we do this. We do this. We do this."
Lisa Rehurek (18:19):
Yeah. I agree with you.
Samantha Enslen (18:20):
So it's not necessarily natural to think about our writing that way. It's something we really have to work out and do thoughtfully.
Lisa Rehurek (18:29):
I find the same thing. I'll be working on a proposal. I'm like, "I teach this. How am I not doing this better?"
Samantha Enslen (18:34):
I know. I know. Yeah.
Lisa Rehurek (18:35):
So for all of you listening out there, we all struggle with it. It's a hard thing to do, and it takes, like you said, kind of that conscious effort to stop and really think about it from their perspective. When you're in the throes of a proposal and there's deadlines and all of that, I know it's hard. I always tell people, "Pick your battles. Find those sections that are highest on the evaluation criteria, and really focus on it there and certainly at the beginning." So great feedback.
Lisa Rehurek (19:04):
One more question here. Let's say someone is preparing a proposal right now. They've got it on their plate. It's almost ready to go. They're listening to this, and they're going, "Oh, crap. There's so much that I want to go back and fix," but they don't have a lot of time. What's one thing you think people can go back and make a big impact with that they can do quickly?
Samantha Enslen (19:20):
Sure. I would say one thing you could do very easily, very quickly is make things smaller. So keep all your same content. Break longer sentences into shorter sentences. Break one long paragraph into two paragraphs. Between your different sections, add meaningful subheads if those aren't there already. Just literally get more white space on the page, and you can do that just by literally hitting a return, more returns, another return, another return. That's going to instantly make your proposal more pleasant to read, more accessible to the reader, and increase your readability scores.
Lisa Rehurek (20:07):
Beautiful. I love that idea, and don't get caught up in, "Oh my gosh. Where does that perfect paragraph break have to be?" or "This paragraph really belongs here." Don't get caught up in that. The person needs to read it, so just go, go, go. Samantha, this has been fantastic, as always. You always have amazing content for anything that I hear from you. So thank you very much.
Samantha Enslen (20:27):
Thank you, and Lisa, Lisa, before we get off, I want to hear about your new book.
Lisa Rehurek (20:31):
Oh, thank you. Yep, I have a new book out called Dare to Be Influential. So it's not necessarily written about RFP specifically, but it's all about how to be more influential by being who you are, and it actually flows into RFPs to a degree. From a company's perspective, you've got to really stand in who you are and know what you are in order to be truly responding from a place of authenticity. So that's what the book is all about.
Samantha Enslen (20:59):
Cool. Yeah, I would love to read that. I've been doing a lot of work in the same vein or at least what I suspect is in the same vein myself, which kind of like how can you step into your own shoes and be, I guess in your words, as influential as you actually are without feeling like, "Oh, I'm being bossy" or "I'm trying to get all the attention for myself" or "I'm being a braggart," kind of all these things that we're taught about, just kind of like, "Stay in the corner. Do your job. Don't draw attention to yourself"? That's kind of all the stuff that I've been thinking about working with recently.
Lisa Rehurek (21:42):
That's amazing. Yeah, and it's so true. I am definitely not one to stand in the corner and [inaudible 00:21:49], but I think that if you're putting yourself out there and you're not being true to who you are, then that's when that spotlight really gets shown on you. If you're standing in your own power and you've planted your flag in who you are and you know who you are, that's when people are going to be drawn to you, and that's when you can make a huge positive impact on the world. I say positive because of course you can do negative things with that, but we all want the positive, right? We don't want that.
Samantha Enslen (22:16):
Cool. Well, I look forward to reading it. I'm going to get on ... Is it on Amazon?
Lisa Rehurek (22:20):
It is on Amazon. Yes.
Samantha Enslen (22:21):
Oh, cool. Okay. [crosstalk 00:22:22] on there.
Lisa Rehurek (22:22):
Well, thank you. Let me know what you think. Ooh, an editor reading my book. That's always-
Samantha Enslen (22:26):
I will not bring an editor's eye. I will only bring somebody who is interested in the content. No worries.
Lisa Rehurek (22:32):
I love that. I love that. Well, this is wonderful. Y'all, we will have information about Samantha in the show notes so you can get in touch with her if you need writing help or anything like that. She's fantastic, and she also puts out a lot of good, really helpful information, probably on your website somewhere. So definitely look her up. She's fantastic, and thank you again for being here.
Samantha Enslen (22:53):
Thanks so much, Lisa. I really appreciate it.
Lisa Rehurek (22:56):
All right, everybody. You've been listening to the RFP Success Show, where we bring you tips and strategies for upleveling your RFP responses. Do you want to know the true cost of losing an RFP? Check out our new ROI calculator on rfproi.com. Thank you all for listening. We'll see you here again next time.
Announcer (23:14):
This has been another episode of the RFP Success Show with Lisa Rehurek, eight-time author, speaker, and CEO of the RFP Success Company. Thank you for joining us. If you have feedback on today's episode, email us at podcast@rfpsuccess.com. No matter your business size or industry, if you have an in-house RFP team or need outside support, the RFP Success Company helps increase RFP win ratios by 10, 20, and even 50%. Learn more at therfpsuccesscompany.com.